Tonight’s Soundgarden poster is the first of a pair of posters for the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland printed by me with the awesome assistance of Chris Shaw at Hangar 18. I always have a great time working with Chris; there’s a lot of history between us, and we have always co-operated and taken on collaborative creative projects so well. I was contacted by Soundgarden to find a friend artist and create a pair of Soundgarden Fox Theater posters – the exact words were “Sister Prints” – both to be printed at my art studio, Hangar 18.

My Soundgarden Sister riffs on Soundgarden’s King Animal album title. I wanted to bring a sense of humanity’s domination of nature. By representing power and privilege, my Sister holds a mink stole by a gold chain through the pelted mink’s nose, and with rock hands. I created an intricate pattern to weave throughout the design using the album cover motifs:

“Summer Print-athalon 2011″ culminates with my Soundgarden, San Francisco poster. There’s so much symbology in the details of this poster, that I think it’s more fun to let you figure it out. So I won’t say anything here. Overall theme is a soothsayer; I feel a lot of Soundgarden’s lyrics are broad and mystical – having a prophetic quality. The figure is one of my Evil Masonic Voodoo Zombies (perhaps a more serious, 33rd degree version).

God this show rocked! I love when the poster and the stage coincidentally (or synchronistically) match. During “Black Hole Sun” the eye in the forehead of the skull grew into a big black dot like the poster – and then turned into a film projection of the sun with an edge of coronal mass ejection – it was veeeeeery cool.